It is not overstating the case to cite Charlie Louvin as a living legend. As a one-time partner in the Louvin Brothers with his late brother Ira, an inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry, and a performer who has been entertaining country, gospel and rock audiences for well over five decades, Louvin has nothing left to prove to anybody. And yet, the 81-year-old icon continues to tour about a third of the year, a seemingly grueling road schedule for a man who clocks in about a decade and a half past normal retirement age.

"My booker asked me a silly question: 'How much do you want to work?'" says Louvin from his Tennessee base. "I said, 'Well, I want to take off on Sept. 18 because that's my wedding anniversary, and I want to be home then. The other 364 days, you can book.' He said, 'You're pulling my leg, aren't you?' And I said, 'Try me, and see if I am.'"

Louvin's recent upswing in live appearances has been fueled by his almost manic release schedule over the past two years since signing with Tompkins Square. His Grammy nominated (and star studded) eponymous debut for the label was followed in the fall by a live album, "Live at Shake It," recorded at a Cincinnati record store just weeks after the release of "Charlie Louvin," his first album of newly recorded material in more than a decade.

Louvin is similarly double booked on the release sheets in 2008. Tompkins Square released "Steps to Heaven," Louvin's first all-gospel album in 15 years, in September, and the label is also readying "Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs" for a December release. There had been talk of releasing the pair as a dichotomous double album, but scheduling prevented it.

"Josh (Rosenthal, Tompkins Square president) talked about the first one being heaven, and I talked about the second one being hell," says Louvin with a laugh. "So, there was an idea of that, but we couldn't finish the second one as soon as he wanted the first one out."

It's certainly no stretch for Louvin to release a gospel album; he and Ira began their joint career as the Louvin Brothers in the '40s singing songs they learned in church as children a decade before their professional debut on the radio. "Steps to Heaven" is a natural addition to Louvin's long and illustrious solo catalog. At the same time, it's been close to 15 years since Louvin recorded an album of inspirational music.

"I did one on an indie label out of Miami, Fla., and the only people that ever knew I did it was the musicians that was on it and me and the guy who owned the label," says Louvin. "He didn't send any out or do anything. I wasn't disappointed in the product, but I was disappointed that people didn't know it. Small records labels just don't have the wherewithal to mail out 3-4,000 CDs and then get someone to help promote it, and I didn't have a publicist then. The title of the album was 'Heaven Knows It Must.' This old boy still puts them out there. He don't pay believe in paying royalties anyway. So, he don't even want your address."

A lot of credit for Louvin's latest resurgence has to go to Rosenthal, who looked up the country/gospel icon after seeing his show in Albany, N.Y. and offered him a contract after noting that Louvin had been unrecorded since 1996. Rosenthal worked up the set list for Louvin's Tompkins Square debut, secured the services of producer Mark Nevers and his star-crossed Rolodex, arranged for the recording of the in-store appearance at Cincinnati's Shake It Records and has largely determined the directions of the next two albums as well.

"For the third one, he suggested we do a gospel," says Louvin. "Mark Nevers knew three black ladies that was sisters and great back-up singers (Alfreda McCrary Lee, Regina and Ann McCrary) and were on some of the biggest records that ever happened. And then we could get Deadrick Lee on piano, and if you've listened to the album, you know he fills the musical part up so well you don't need nothin' else. I was pleased with the end results."

Louvin is the first to admit that he has been more than just a little hesitant to jump back into gospel, given the impossibly high bar set by he and Ira back in the '50s. "All the records that my brother and I ever cut are still available," says Louvin. "I can't say that I could even do it that good because there was only one Ira Louvin, and he's not recording down here now, anyway. It's impossible for me to better what the Louvin Brothers done, so I've left them alone for that reason. I don't like me by myself singing gospel, but if you get a good vocal group behind you sometimes, it's alright."

Still in all, the allure of returning to a straight gospel format proved to be irresistible for Louvin. "The chance to do this was good for me because the first four years of the Louvin Brothers being on Capitol Records, we did nothing but gospel songs," says Louvin. "They already had a secular duet by the name of Jim and Jesse, and they got their contract by singing a Louvin Brothers song, 'Are You Missing Me.' When we could, we expanded into secular music. We didn't forsake the gospel, we still recorded a secular album and a gospel album in that manner as long as we was on the label, until we broke up Aug. 18, 1963."

Ira Louvin died in a car crash in Missouri on June 20, 1965.

"Steps to Heaven" is different from Louvin's 2007 debut for Tompkins Square in tone as well as theme. Well connected producer Nevers brought in a wide variety of guests to appear on Louvin's sessions last year, including Elvis Costello, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Bobby Bare Sr., George Jones and Marty Stuart, among others. Given the hymnal foundation of the new album, the idea was to keep the proceedings as low key as possible.

Unlike the first album, Louvin himself compiled the set list suggestions. After recording 13 songs - including a pair of Louvin Brothers classics, There's a Higher Power and Just Rehearsing - Rosenthal concluded that three of them covered similar sonic territory and dropped them from the finished album. In addition, Nevers decided to augment a few of the vocals-and-piano numbers with a touch of doghouse bass and electric guitar courtesy of Chris Scruggs. The resulting work is a powerhouse of classic gospel.

"The first song on the album is an old sacred harp song; it might have been the first song I ever heard," says Louvin of Love at Home." "My mama's mother was a Haynes, and they have the Haynes reunion in Dutton, Ala. each year - and I still go to it - and they sing nothing but sacred harp shape note music. They don't even have a piano in the church where they sing. You have one guy that gets up, and whether it's in sharps or flats, he runs the scale and arrives at the pitch that the song is written for, and he hums it and everybody in the congregation sings the notes one time through, and then they sing the lyric. That's where the Louvin Brothers sound came from. They have harmony parts that the world hadn't heard unless they'd heard sacred harp people do them."

Between the sound of sacred harp singing and the abiding love and respect for their church, the Louvins' path to gospel in the '50s was nearly a foregone conclusion. It was their God-given talent that allowed them to reshape the genre. "We was raised in a good home," says Louvin. "Regardless of what you did on Saturday night, you didn't have to ask, 'Are we going to church tomorrow?' You knew you were. We were never sent to church, we were always carried to church. I think it makes a world of difference to a child. It gives them values they couldn't get no place else."

Another highlight on "Steps to Heaven" is the standard Precious Lord, Take My Hand. By coincidence, the hymn's writer, Thomas Darcy, was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 1979 on the same night that the Louvin Brothers were honored. That night, Darcy told Louvin the tragic story of how he came to write the song, and it's a story that Louvin tells onstage before he sings it.

"Thomas Darcy was a preacher in Memphis, Tenn.," says Louvin. "He'd obligated himself to preach a revival in St. Louis, but his wife was so pregnant that he was afraid to leave and afraid it would happen. The doctor assured him, 'It'll be two weeks after you get back before this child comes.' So he believed the doctor, as he should have, I guess. The night of the revival, he was in the pulpit fixing to preach and somebody handed him a note that said, 'We lost the mother, we saved the child.' He wrote the song on the way home."

The night of the induction, Louvin asked Darcy about the song, and knowing the lyrics and the emotion of it so well, wondered if Darcy had actually contemplated suicide. "I said, 'You thought about ending your life, didn't you Thomas?' and he said, 'I'm a man of the Lord, I could never do anything like that,'" says Louvin. 'I said, 'But you wrote it in the song, you had to think it.' If you're familiar with the song, in the third verse, it says, 'By the river I stand, guide my feet, hold my hand.' That was when he contemplated leaving this world. He said, 'I did think of it, but I didn't do it, that's the important thing.' If you look in the hymnals you'll see a lot of songs by Thomas Darcy, but that one's a jewel."

The flip side of "Steps to Heaven" comes in early December when Tompkins Square drops "Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs." "I included some things that I hard back when Ira and I was together; I recorded Tom Dooley, Wreck of the Old 97, Darling Corey and It Was Said When That Old Canoe Went Down, which was about the Titanic," says Louvin. "They didn't all get the trigger pulled on them. You don't have to shoot a man to kill him. Sometimes words can kill as fast as a gun. They're all tragic songs."

One song holds a personal meaning for Louvin. "I even recorded one the most disastrous songs I ever heard in my life; Roy Acuff's Wreck on the Highway," says Louvin. "When they start talking about the whiskey and blood and glass running together, that's tragic. If a man gets behind the steering wheel drunk, he should be charged with attempted murder. That steering wheel in his hands can wipe a family out in a split second."

Even by Charlie Louvin's amazing yardstick (gospel success in the '50s, country success in the '60s, a resurrection in the '70s through the adoration and patronage of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris), the past couple of years have been incredible. Louvin has opened for Lucinda Williams, the Detroit Cobras, Cake and Cheap Trick; he just concluded a tour with the Old 97s - and survived a recent accident when a driver lost control and rammed his RV - and is currently pondering offers to take his gospel album on the road.

Although the volume of some of the rock shows he's opened has been slightly disconcerting, Louvin is appreciative of all the attention he's received lately from across the musical spectrum. "It's been a great experience for me," says Louvin humbly. "I'm blessed with good health, and if I don't get out there while I've still got my health and can sing on key, then I'm lazy, and Lord knows I'm not that."